The Under Appreciated Dandelion

 Dandelions are weeds.

At least where I come from.

(I come from the northern hemisphere).

Dandelions are everywhere and we don't want them anywhere.

Or so I was brought up to believe.

It was almost like theism.

It was in your bones, or your brain, or your matrix of unproven beliefs and prejudices.

But it was there.

Weeds have one destiny: to be rooted out (almost a pun) .

And I have rooted out many.

Dandelions and such.

However, there came a time when I began to look at things, rather than drawing upon my reservoir of well-known-stuff and commonly held prejudices. 

It was as if I had added another and new thing to the first thing that I have always held to be true: America's human diversity will ultimately win out over it's monocultural white supremacist dead end racism.

A coffee colored democracy will be the prototype of the next billenium.

The Star Trek implications of that are not lost on me. 

I thought that up in the 1950's, though.

So I am in parallel to Star Trek, not mouthing its message.

But let's get back to the point of this post.

This is about dandelions.

Back when I began to look at dandelions as things, rather looking at them through the lens of prejudice and well founded, long term, well known, completely vetted family beliefs, I began to see spectacular bursts of yellowness here and there strewn in the path of my life where I had previously only seen weeds.

That wasn't very long ago, sadly I say.

I should have noticed them back in the 1950's.

But I did begin noticing dandelions.

Finally.

And I began taking pictures of them.

Here are a few of those images.

The first one I don't know where it is; I think it is Lopez Island; the next three are in Seattle; the last two are in Paris, and the fact that one doesn't have any flowers is significant.